Category: Health Care

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It’s safe and legal abortion that bothers them

A while ago, Erick Erickson, a Republican strategist, expressed the view that liberals should start stocking up on wire coat hangers, because that was the only way they would get an abortion when more states follows the lead of Texas. It made me immediately feel queasy, since it shows so clearly that it’s not the abortion per se that is bothering republicans. It’s more the fact that it can be performed safely and cheaply in clinics that listens to and respect their patients. Considering that most abortion providers don’t get any money from the government for performing abortions, it cannot be because of cost to tax payers.

Another interesting effect of the Texas legislation, is that people living near the Mexico border will on a practical level not have access to any abortion provider. Considering that many of the people getting abortion right now are migrant workers, their only choice would be to go to Mexico to get the care they need. However, the ones with questionable legal status to be in the United States don’t have that luxury, if we call it that. Their only choices are to get an illegal abortion, which is dangerous and increases the risk that they will end up in emergency care, which does end up costing all of us money, or to have the baby, which of course means that they give birth to another American citizen. Yes, the much reviled anchor baby. Hopefully one of them grows up to become President of the United States.

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Warning to the Democrats and the undecided

I did not pen these words, but they are so true:

Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says, “Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them- we will do more of them we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”

But, my friends, these evaders are banking too heavily on the shortness of our memories. No one will forget that they had their golden opportunity—twelve long years of it.

Remember, too, that the first essential of doing a job well is to want to see the job done. Make no mistake about this: the Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job’s being done.

The most astonishing fact to  me is that this is from a Democratic Convention speech that Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered in 1936. And it still rings true today.

My warning is, beware of the republicans offerings when it comes to budget work. They don’t want to save Medicare. They want it to fail fast. They don’t want to spread financial opportunities across the population. They want to institute a class system akin to the old British system, with Lords and Dukes and other nobility. Not in title, but in practice. Bu having an elite of people who owns close to everything, means that the rest of the people will become vassals with no chance to move into the owning class.

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An Apple a Day…

We all know the old saying. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. As I brought an apple to work today i thought about that and the possibility to convert this into truly bipartisan health reform. We would get health care for all with support from the fruit farmers. On top of taht it would be cheap. Even if we paid $1.00 per apple, it would still only cost $365.00 per person per annum. Much cheaper than what we have right now. How could that go wrong?

Of course I had to figure out how many apples we need first of all. The latest CIA factbook figure lists the population of the USA as 307,212,123 as of July last year. I’m going to work with 310,000,000 to make it easy. 2 significant digits is good enough for me. Multiply that with 365 and we find that we need around 11o billion apples a year to keep the doctor away from from Americans. I’m sure that all the doctors and their families don’t really want to do that, so I’ll have to do some subtraction. Accorting to Bureau of Labor Statistics there were about 660,000 doctors in 2008. That includes dentists and medical doctors, but no other health care professionals. With the census number of average family size of 2.59 people the size of the group of non-doctor-repelling people would be approximately 1.7 million people. After recalculating I still end up with 110 billion apples. As far as the need for apples go, doctors are insignificant.

Next question is of course, how many apples are produced in the US annually? According to the US Apple Association the average in the early 2000s was about 230 million 42 lb units (in case you wonder that is equivalent of a bushel). This figure is confirmed by USDA figures. Yahoo! answers says that you get about 3 apples to a pound, which would mean that the total US apple production would be approximately 29 billion apples annually. That means that to be able to keep each American with an apple a day we would have to quadruple apple production, or we could import the rest. The funny thing is that, at the moment, the US exports about 2.5 times as many apples as it imports. There is no way every American could get an apple a day. Probably more like an apple every 3 to 4 days. And that would not keep the doctor away.

I was hoping that I had landed on the panacea of bipartisan healt care reform, but it turns out, once again, that we don’t have the resources to keep people healthy. I guess I’ll go back to arguing for a single payer system.